After the death of his father, a solder with an
infantry division during World War II, Bob Greene set out to try to understand
his dad's life with the assistance of an unlikely ally
who lived just a few miles away -- Paul Tibbets,
the combat pilot who flew the atomic bomb to
Japan. This is the third of three excerpts from
Greene's new book, "Duty: A Father, His Son, and
the Man Who Won the War."

http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
'"WE CAME TO MATURITY QUICKLY," Paul Tibbets said. "We didn't do it because
we had sat down and made the choice. We did it because our lives depended on
it."

In the months after my father's death, I had been talking to Tibbets a lot.
He and my dad were the same age -- 83, having been born within a few weeks of
each other in 1915.

I asked him about how much the soldiers' lives had depended on each other
-- both in matters that could kill them if someone did something wrong, or
matters that would merely inconvenience them if someone declined to do a
little thing right. And I decided to tell Tibbets one small story, from a
Christmas Eve long ago.

"We were in the house," I said. "All of us were still little kids. And
there was this huge sound from the garage, like an explosion or something, and
then the sound of water gushing.

"It was freezing outside. We opened the side door that led into the
garage-- and a water pipe had burst. It must have been a pipe that extended
across the ceiling of the garage, because the water was just pouring onto my
father's and my mother's cars. I mean, more water than you've ever seen come
out of a pipe.

"And you could tell that it was very hot water -- it was really steaming as
it came out of the ceiling of the garage. And we stood there -- I can see my
father looking at it -- and what were we supposed to do? It was Christmas Eve
-- late in the evening on Christmas Eve, if I'm remembering right. Who are you
going to find on Christmas Eve to come fix a burst water pipe?"

"What did your father do?" Tibbets asked.

"Well, I remember him going to the phone in the back hallway, and calling
all these plumbing services," I said. "But of course, no one was there. So he
looked up the home numbers of some plumbers who lived near us, and he told
them what had happened. But they didn't want to go out on Christmas Eve. I
couldn't blame them -- but the water was just gushing into our garage.

"I guess what I think about when I think about that is: In the Army, you
always must have had all these people to do every job with you. You had been
asked to save the world-- but even on the little things, there were millions
of you, always doing everything together. However tedious it might have been,
however hurry-up-and-wait, at least you were all there. You know that old
line: 'Yeah? You and what army?' You had the answer, back then. You and what
army? The United States Army."

"So what's that have to do with the garage on Christmas Eve?" Tibbets said.

"If he'd been back in the Army, there would have been hundreds of guys
around to fix the pipe," I said. "Hundreds of pairs of hands. And I remember
him standing there with his family, with all the water pouring out . . . and I
think about whether life got so much harder for all of you once you got home,
and there was no army with you. The pipe blows, the furnace breaks . . . and
it's not you and what army anymore. It's just you."

"It's still you and the Army," Tibbets said.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"That's one of the things that the war did for us," he said. "It's an old
saying, but it's a true one: There is nothing like American ingenuity. For the
GIs during the war, it was a question of coming upon new problems to solve
every day. Problems that none of us had ever anticipated before -- and we had
to figure out ways to solve them every day of the war.

"Yes, we did it together -- but I don't think that made it harder once we
got home. I think it made it easier. Because we had all those months and years
of coming up with solutions when there was no choice but to find a solution.
So your friends might not be with you once you got home and were faced with
problems -- but the experiences you had gone through were with you."

"So you don't think a lot of men didn't know what to do once they didn't
have the Army at their side?" I said.

"I think a guy's lost if he feels that way," Tibbets said. "And I don't
think a lot of us came home feeling lost. We had our experiences inside of us.
That was as good as having our friends from the Army next to us. Or almost as
good."

"What happened with the burst water pipe in the garage?" he said. "Did it
just keep pouring the water out all night long?"

"No," I said. "He got it shut off."

"I'm not surprised," Tibbets said. "Did a plumber come over?"

"No," I said.

"Then how did he fix the pipe?" Tibbets asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't remember what he did."

"He did something," Tibbets said. "And whatever he did, it worked."

"It must have," I said.

"That's my point," Tibbets said.

- - -

I have seen some impressive things in my life. I have never seen anything
to match the way my mother cared for my father in the months of his dying.

When he became totally bedridden, virtually everyone to whom she went for
advice-- his doctor, our relatives, her friends, in the end the hospice
people-- told her the same thing: You must make some time for yourself. If you
try to do everything, if you try to be with him every minute, you will exhaust
yourself, deplete your strength and health, perhaps even shorten your own
life. For his sake as well as your own, you must regularly step away-- you
must breathe.

She said yes. She said of course she knew that was true.

And then she didn't do it.

With the exception of when she took a shower, or went to the grocery to buy
food, or had to leave the house for an essential errand, she did not leave
him. He became more emotionally dependent on her than he ever had been; he
became frightened and disoriented when she would leave the room. We had hired
a man to come to the house every day to do the things she was not physically
strong enough to do -- lift him from the bed, assist him with the functions
that must be tended to; there was time to give herself some peace. She didn't
want it. She wanted to be with him.

As his confusion grew, he began to ask her the same questions over and
over. This was a man who never forgot a detail -- and all of a sudden he was
interrogating her about things that made no evident sense, and when she would
offer some explanations to calm him, he would nod -- and then, within minutes,
ask the same questions once more.

And she would hold his hand and answer. Softly, lovingly, without rancor--
she would go through everything again.

He would ask: What about the third floor? Was the third floor cleaned up?
It was important -- the third floor had to be straightened. Had she done it
yet?

And she would explain with gentle patience: Their house did not have a
third floor.

The mailman-- had she given the mailman the notice yet? If the mailman came
and she didn't give him the notice, he didn't know what they would do. Was she
certain the mailman hadn't arrived yet?

And she would ask him what he wanted her to tell the mailman-- and he would
look off, not being able to think of it, and finally say that he guessed he
was mixed up-- he guessed it didn't matter. Then: Had the mailman come yet?
Had she remembered to tell the mailman what he had asked her to tell him?

The white pipe that he wanted her to adjust; the geometric forms that he
wanted her to explain. In his dying he became stuck on these things, things
that defied logic, and she would sit and talk with him about them as if it
were 40 years earlier, and they were talking about their children, or their
vacation plans, or their hopes.

From the sound of her voice, you would think that these awful conversations
were the most wonderful moments she could ever spend She was talking with her
husband.

- - -

On the tape he had made for us children several years before, telling his
life story, you have to jump past his induction into the Army to find his
first reference to her.

It comes after he had been at Camp Shelby in Mississippi for a while; it
comes as he is describing a trip to Columbus he had taken when the soldiers
had been granted a leave:

"In Columbus I had met a certain Phyllis Harmon, and I thought she was kind
of nice. I had taken her to the movies on one of my previous trips to Columbus
when I was first visiting Violet and Sam.

"She seemed like an OK gal, but I didn't pay a hell of a lot of attention
to her because I was still squiring around a girl named Nana Bowler, who lived
up in Lima.

"Well, I didn't think a heck of a lot about Phyllis Harmon until after I
had been in the Army for about six months, and I believe she and I started
corresponding with each other.

"One fine day when I was on leave in Columbus, she volunteered to drive me
to Union Station where I would catch a train to go up to Akron to see my
folks. I remember the old blue/gray Pontiac she was driving, and I also
remember she looked pretty damn good to me, and I said to myself, I think I'm
going to marry that gal.

"Little did I know that I really was going to. I believe that that little
ride to the train station from Violet's house with Phyllis was the luckiest
thing that ever happened to me. That fact has proven itself time and time and
time again over the years."

- - -

There was a moment -- when Paul Tibbets was trying to explain something to
me-- when I failed to understand what he meant at first.

He ended up raising his voice. The matter at hand was that important.

I had told him that I was struggling with the question of why my father --
and, apparently, so many men his age -- thought that on some level the war was
the best experience of their lives.

Not that it was fun; not that it was enjoyable. But as terrible as the war
was, there was nothing else in my dad's entire life that meant quite as much
to him. Nothing that came before, nothing that came after, ever seemed to
contain the same power.

And although I understood some of the reasons for this, I didn't understand
them all. I asked Tibbets if he did.

"It was because your father was a man among men," he said.

That sentence stopped me. Tibbets had never known my dad -- the two had
never met. I thought, just for a second, that Tibbets might be patronizing me
-- might be saying something he knew would please me by praising my father to
an extent that was not possible from someone who had never set eyes on him. I
thought that he was calling my dad a man's man -- giving him a macho,
dagger-between-the-teeth, pistol-swinging-from-the-belt stature.

And I said so: "How do you know that he was a man among men? It's a very
nice thing for you to say -- but my dad was just another soldier."

That's when Tibbets' voice got louder.

"I don't mean it that way!" he said. "What I mean is that the war was the
one time in a man's life that he got to be a man surrounded by men, all of
them working for the same thing, no one better than the person next to him,
regardless of rank.

"A time like that comes along only once in a lifetime -- if that. You are
literally risking your life every day, and you're doing it with the men who
are next to you. You form friendships during days and nights like those that
no one and nothing in your life will ever match.

"Please pay attention: The reason those years mean so much to so many of us
is that it is the one time in your life that you are absolutely proud of what
you are doing, and you are absolutely proud of your friends and what they are
doing. It's a relationship of man to man.

"It's your ass and his -- your ass and the guy next to you and the guy next
to him. And the people back home can't see you, and they don't know what
you're doing, and they don't know who you're doing it with. These men are your
friends, and you are depending on them to live.

"Men among men! Men among men! And when you come back home after the war,
it is never the same. You faced odds, and you made it back, and you faced down
your worst fears. And all of a sudden you're back in a country where things
are quieter, things are safer, and the people around you on the streets are
not all working for the same goal.

"And you go on, and the war is over, and you become the person you will be
for the rest of your life. But inside of you, the time when you were men among
men will never go away. That's all I was trying to tell you.

"You had asked me a question. Why it all meant so much to your dad. I was
trying to explain. It's no big secret. I think it was probably the same for
all of us. We would be fools to think that anything that ever came along later
in our lives could affect us like the war did. The best experience of our
lives? 'Best' is a funny word. But there is nothing we could ever do that
could ever measure up to what we found in each other's company when our
country sent us off to do what we
did."

JWR contributor Bob Greene is a novelist and columnist. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

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